AudioGrabber and Lame Installation

Now, we will setup AudioGrabber for use with this tutorial. In it, we rip to WAV file first, mainly because it is faster, but it also allows you to save a copy of the WAV files to CD/DVD for later use, so you will not need to keep dragging out your original CDs. After everything is installed as above, you should see an AudioGrabber icon on your Window's Desktop, double click that with your mouse, and off we go...

This is what the AudioGrabber main screen should look like:

Click the settings button on top, and you will be taken to the General Settings page:

Step 1: Ensuring that AudioGrabber is setup properly.

AudioGrabber has many options available, here are the ones of most concern to us.

Naming tab under General Settings:

We have a folder called MP3 on our D drive, and have created a subfolder under that called WAVIN. This is where we will store the intermediate WAV files. You can name your directory whatever you choose.

We have set the filename to be Track name, followed by Artist name, which is simply a matter of preference. Putting in any more than that is usually not necessary, and also makes for very long filenames. We choose track name first, because that is how we most often look for our tracks.

Sub Directories entries are all checked, this will have the effect of putting all the ripped WAV files into one folder to make it easier to encode later, and when encoding happens, the songs will then be placed in subfolders under that with Artist\Album as the organizational structure.

Silence Settings:

We set this up to remove most of the silence before and after a song, less 1/2 second.

MP3 Settings:

Here we tell AudioGrabber to rip to WAV file format. Appending the ID3 tag info, which it will use when it does the encode to MP3 later.

We are setup to use the LAME encoder when we actually do the encoding. We use a Constant Bitrate, as almost all DJ software will decode these with no problems. We use 192 kbps bitrate, as this is the minimum you should use for DJ work, although if you have plenty of disk space, you can use higher if you like.

Quality is set to Stereo and High, although you can use Joint Stereo as well, and in fact, it usually goes that way anyway :)

Those are most of the settings we need to be concerned with, although AudioGrabber has many more if you want to play around with them.

Step 2: Ripping a CD

Put a CD into your drive, and you should see something similar to the following after a few seconds:

Click on the penguin, which will contact the FreeDB database on the internet and look up the CD info, you should then see something like this (our first disc is a compilation of 80's tunes):

You then click the GRAB button at the top, and AudioGrabber will begin ripping the songs to your hard drive in the initial WAV format. You will see a progress screen while this is happening (it says MP3 at the bottom, but is ripping to WAV at this point).

When completed, it will eject the disc (if you have that option set), and you should see a screen like this:

At this point, we went ahead and ripped another CD for demonstration purposes. If we look in Window's Explorer, our folders and files should look something like this, as all the songs should now reside in the WAVIN folder, in WAV format.

Step 3: Encoding to MP3.

At this point, we are ready to proceed with the encode to MP3. Your first try should have only ripped one or two CDs, so you can test them after the encode, and make sure they are going to be suitable for bitrate, naming conventions, etc. After you become comfortable with the process, you will probably want to rip a number of CDs before doing the encoding process. If you have a large number of songs to encode, this will take some time, so I generally start the encode before I go to bed, or when doing something else.

Click the File menu in AudioGrabber, choose Make MP3, and you will see a file picker dialog box like this after you browse to the folder you ripped to. We then highlight the first song, scroll to the right all the way, and SHIFT-Left Click, which will highlight all the songs in-between as well. Note: Because of a limitation with filename sizes, how many files you can encode at one time will vary. If you highlight say 500 songs, and the program does nothing, you have exceeded that limit, try selecting less files when you encode. There is no way to tell how many exactly, as it depends on the size of your filenames and path, but you will soon get a feel for how many you can encode as a general rule.

Now, click the Open button, and the encoding begins... You will see a progress dialog similar to this (as you can see, it's the same as the earlier progress dialog):

When the encoding has completed, you will see something like this in Window's Explorer. You will notice that AudioGrabber has created subfolders under the WAVIN folder for Artist name (in this case Various, since they were compilation discs), and then Album name under artist.

You can now either delete the intermediate WAV files in the WAVIN folder, or make copies onto CD or DVD before deleting them(highly recommended, as you can always re-encode them again later without having to re-rip them from the original CD). WAV files take up quite a bit of space, so unless you are going to be playing them instead of MP3, you will want to remove them.

Unless you need to further process your files for BPM or Album art, etc., you are now ready to import these files into RockIt. Click the Add Tracks button in RockIt, check the Search Subfolders button, then browse to the WAVIN folder (or whatever you called yours), and all the MP3 song files will show up in the file list, Select All and click Add.

So, that's about all there is to it. Check to insure the quality of the bitrate is good enough for your needs, and happy ripping :)

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